Power consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

Test System

CPU:

AMD Athlon64 FX-60 @ 2800 MHz(Toledo, 1024 KB Cache)

Motherboard:

ABIT AT8, BIOS 1.1ATI Radeon XPRESS 200

Memory:

2x 1024MB G.Skill F1-4000BIU2-2GBHV CL3

Harddisk:

WD Raptor 360GD 36 GB

Power Supply:

OCZ GameXStream 700W

Software:

Windows XP SP2

Drivers:

NVIDIA: 93.71ATI: Catalyst 6.10

To measure power consumption, the whole system's mains power draw was measured. This means that these numbers include CPU, Memory, HDD, Video card and PSU inefficiency.

The load value was obtained by running 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. While the test was running, power consumption was recorded. Readings are listed in the following cards. 8800 GTX (2) is at 2048 x 1536 8xAA, 16xAF.

Even though NVIDIA recommends two power connectors, the power draw of the GeForce 8800 GTX is minimal for this class of card. Basically you get almost double the performance at the same power draw compared to the Radeon X1950 XTX.

Since NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX does not use reduced clocks in 2D mode, the power consumption in 2D and idle is a bit higher though.